Monitoring of business processes and services using concept probes and business process probes

Abstract

A computer-implemented business process monitoring system and method are disclosed. The business process runs in a Business Process Management Suite (BPMS) having a BPMS monitoring component. The activities of the business process communicate with services running in a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) having an SOA monitoring component. The system includes memory which stores a concept probe and optionally a business process probe. The concept probe receives information from the BPMS monitoring component and the SOA monitoring component about activities associated with the concept probe and aggregates the information, generating alerts. The business process probe receives information from the concept probes and the BPMS and aggregates the data, generating alerts.

Description

BACKGROUND[0001]The exemplary embodiment relates to monitoring of business processes and business activities and their associated services in a service-oriented environment.[0002]Business Process Management (BPM) and Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) are two significant aspects of business enterprise solutions. BPM addresses the methodology and tools that enable the management of business processes (BPs) as they evolve throughout their lifecycles. A Business Process Management Suite (BPMS) executes business processes and connects them to various enterprise resources, such as a personnel directory, various legacy applications, and, in some cases, to the organization's SOA. An enterprise SOA typically manages the reusable technical services used to execute tasks that occur in business processes. Their functionality, granularity, and interfaces define their level of reuse across a multitude of business processes. In general, the closer the SOA services match the business requirement...

AI Technical Summary

Benefits of technology

The patent describes a computer-implemented business process monitoring system that includes a set of concept probes that are connected to a business process management suite and a service oriented architecture. These concept probes acquire information about the activities of the business process and the services that are called upon by those activities. The concept probes then generate monitoring information based on that information. The system also includes memory that stores mappings between the activities of the business process and the services in the service oriented architecture. The system can help to improve the monitoring of business processes and detect any issues or bugs in the process.

Problems solved by technology

A problem with business process monitoring is that the techniques generally use generic tools to provide separate monitoring of business processes and services.

Because these tools are generic and not specific to business domains, they do not provide details of business concepts in the business processes and do not provide an automatic mechanism to correlate business processes with services.

As a consequence, it is hard to make use of the monitoring data in order to present meaningful metrics to business users, without significant configuration efforts for each BP.

While this could be addressed by manually selecting monitoring information by a business user, this could be time-consuming.

It is also difficult to correlate the execution of business concepts to the execution of services in the SOA layer.

While such data could be extracted with post-mortem analysis techniques on the execution logs, this is slow, manual and cumbersome and does not allow real-time reaction to events (such as enforcing the rule that a particular service may not exceed a given execution time when called in the context of the execution of a particular business concept, while allowing it to exceed this time when running in the context of another concept).

It is also difficult to establish wide-ranging service-level-agreements (SLA) that affect all BPs equally.

This would be time consuming to implement with each new BP.

In addition, the existing frameworks are typically technology-dependent, so when companies migrate their applications to other platforms, the monitoring infrastructure also has to be migrated.

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